Designing A Website

Planning your site

Assessing competitors

There are two methods to look at the physical dimensions of your competition. They are financial and operational. 2 methods to assess competition:
Financial examination helps you to have an idea of the state of an overall business. These include the size of the company, investors, revenue sources and the traffic to the site.

Operational or functional examination helps you to have knowledge of the activities of a business on the internet-the organizational method of the site, the features offered and the level of rapidity with which it operates.

Financial examination

The first method to observe a competitor is to have information of the state of their business. Is it effective and makes substantial profits? How established is the business? Does it have more than one stream of revenue? Is it expanding in the market or contracting? Who are the other businesses that have partnered with it?

This is the established or common strategy to competitive examination, which is crucial in any business. There is more than one source for the information. In case your competitors happen to be public firms, greater part of this information will be public. On Hoovers.com, you can find big private firms that are outlined along with business organizations that are public. However, if they are in private possession, you’ll have to put in greater effort to examine them. You can take the help of research organizations, such as Nielsen, where you can have an idea of the capacity of their audiences and business.

Articles from newspapers and magazines can also be of great help in this regard. The site itself may furnish a lot of details of a competitor. Quite often corporate pages have staff directories, the names of partners and investors and press releases on a product that has been released along with the incomes of business organizations.

Functional examination

The second method to assess a competitor is to visit its website and examine its performance. This helps you to understand whom you are competing with and build in concepts for your own site.

For instance, if you are introducing a site for your restaurant, have a look at the sites of other restaurants. Look at how they are organized and the features they have included. Do these sites have standard buttons or headings? Where is there contact information located? Do they have a menu or pictures of the dining room?

Having an idea of these fine points will facilitate to deal with any problems with your own site. It will also assist you to comprehend the expectations of the visitors. You’ll often discover that rules of conduct have emerged within your particular sector.

It’s crucial for you to utilize every single aspect on these sites as functionality can be misled. Your assumptions of the features may in reality work in a different manner, or they may be dormant. Great sounding aspects quite often do not stick to their affirmation.
It’s also vital not to get drawn to all the options available. Despite the fact that they may be attractive in appearance, the best sites are hardly the most effective.

Having an idea of your competitors

Don’t you have an idea of how well your competitors are faring? You need to ask the following:

How well are they performing? Look at the level of traffic for competitors on the web (How high are they? Are they expanding or contracting?). Also, look at the revenue of the company and its size.

In what direction are they moving? What are their activities performed recently? What are the alliances they have declared? What are the things they give importance to for obtaining a position? What are the things to which they do not attach importance? What audience do they focus on?

What functions best on their site? What is the thing that attracts you to their website? What looks to be well-known? Why do you think it is so?

What are their faults? What’s not functioning on their site? Is it puzzling? Slow? Do features function as anticipated?

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